Favorite LAdies and Favorite Country
 

...notice I didn't mention anything about birds. Great habitat and poor quail numbers. The future of bobwhite quail is beyond terrifying.

But we enjoyed our armed walk in the woods.

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Where are you?
Pines look like Al.,Ga.Miss. or Carolina..
I spent many ,many happy ours huntin Gentleman Bob in SouthEast Alabama.

Eastern Carolinas! :)

dont know whats happening to the quail but ive not jumped 1 quail this hunting season and ive beenin the woods alot....the state of miss is also low in numbers of quail.... charlie

jent you mite be right the south is covered in fireants....in the fields at my house you have to watch were you step...as you said nothing seems to keep the fireant at bay.... charlie

Fireants eating baby quail?! Jeez. In Michigan it's just coyotes, coons, feral cats, and possums. But fire ants? I had never thought of that one. Easier to dodge the bears up here than to avoid ants. Good thing I live up here where life is 'safe'... What's next, eh?

It must be easy livin' up there right now Rich, what with the bears in hibernation and all...

I dunno. Go back to Nash B's timeframe, and I suspect they didn't yet have the chemicals which have been recently used to control Fire Ants. However, they seemed to have plenty of birds. Something else has changed. Farming practices are my guess.

texas quail
 

Saw this guy this am but was just walking around enjoying the 55 d weather..Bill:):)

Check Wikipedia. The article holds that the fire ant was introduced to the South in 1930 from a ship docked at Mobile. I thought it was a fairly recent immigrant.

The wild quail had nearly disappeared from Southern Illinois where I'm from by the time I got old enough to hunt, we never had the fire ant and still don't. These days, in that area, you could hunt with a good dog five days a week and be lucky to find one covey. Two words are what's killing our small game and those two words are farm chemicals.

Destry

Jent - I helped spread fire ant killer in Texas about 5 years ago. The man who bought the stuff would not have bought anything illegal, and whatever the stuff was, it sure controlled those ants

Jent,

That's all well and good, I'm sure ants do kill quail. But how do you explain them disappearing from Southern Illinois when there were no fire ants at all? There were just as many quail there in the 50's and 60's as there were in your area of the south.


Destry

We can purchase fire ant poison in Texas at the Hardware stores in any quanity from "yard" size to "ranch size".The stuff works well,it is grandular in form.The littlt b-----ds take it down the nest and feed it to the queen..kills them DEAD..
Biggest problem here is loss of habitat..my best quail areas of just a few years ago now have malls on them...Bill

The place where I first had a covey of quail scare me sh----- in Maryland is now a parking lot for a condominium complex. There wasn't even a maintained road to the place 50 years ago and now it is full of people and their cars. Very sad as it doesn't really make a very good place for people but it sure was nice for quail and 300 yards away was great duck shooting on the North East river.

Folks - we live in a sad and terrifying time for our beloved non-migratory gamebirds. Grouse, feral pheasant and gentleman Bob.

I think fire ants are a very valid theory but it has been proven as both a factor and as a non-factor. Just as the spread of disease through mold and chemical on deer corn piles, chemicals ingested through eating soybeans, the isolation of suitable habitat due to development, etc etc etc.

My chips are on a disease. Or some major chain in the plants that make-up their diet.

Or round-up?

One thing for sure is that they havent just disappeared - they have disappeared. Yet no one but a few remaining bird hunters seem to care.

My father is out and about around the country quite a bit and he said he knows of exactly one covey of wild quail that can be found on a regular basis there around home. Plenty of cover for them down home, lots of public land that isn't farmed, etc etc. It just seems to me that if you look at the time frame of when all these chemical fertilizer, herbicides, and pesticides came into such general use you'll find a correlation. In Southern Illinois they were essentially gone by the late 70's. Roundup was first marketed in 1973.....


Destry

Three weeks ago out by Cimmaron I put up four decent coveys in a half mile walk along a crop/ brush border. No Round Up was used this year on it but last year in the same place Round Up was used and I put up three coveys. No fire ants out there, but plenty of coyotes and hawks.

Friends in eastern MO tell me they are getting quail back by leaving cover for them and trapping/shooting predators.

Wouldn't know about other parts of the country but looking at the first picture of the tall pines and short grass, I wouldn't see that as quail cover. I'm used to finding quail in this stuff, and here is my dog holding a covey:

A good friend of mine here in Virginia says he and his buds have seen more bobwhite this year than in the past 20. It seems eastern Virginia is seeing an increase in the population, and that's after a very bad winter last year. He hunts in Orange County thereabouts (Charlottesville area) and he said he put up four covies in half a day couple weeks ago.

My ruffed grouse regular just left the feed pile but he was plowing through fresh snow at -5deg on his way to cover. Headed for -30 for the week. Don't know how they do it.

We have more bob's than ever and there is a lot of spraying around here. not that i think spraying is the greatest thing. the idiots worry more about cow poop than spary i know witch i would rather have on me. yup i need spell check Dean:whistle: ch

Fire ants have been moving slowly north and did not reach S. Carolina until the 1960's.
David

We have alot of quail here in Idaho.I live on the edge of a small town with 4 ponds behind my house.as the new subdivisions build there new homes and the people move in they bring the biggest killer of quail the dreaded feline. I would have upwards of 100 quail coming in to feed every evening but now you may see 8 or 10. They haven't all been killed but have just moved a little further down the river valley. I could drive out just a couple miles and take pictures of coveys of 30 to 50 birds right now. I have to be careful about shooting the dreaded felines for two reasons. If the homeowner reports you they come and want to take all your guns and I live right next. to the Governor so the sound of gun fire probably would be reported. Have a great day Thomas L. Benson Sr.

The domestic cat kills for the joy of it,not for food as wild species do.
These killers can be "relocated" with the help of a varmit trap and a big sack.
Drop them off at the Governor's back door...
Bill

But that would be Thomas' back door as well.

felines are probably a quails nitemare...when man goes into birds or animals turf they usally get the worst end of it....charlie

Charlie: I was almost a meal for a really big kitty-cat about 10 yrs ago here in Idaho but thanks to my hunting partner he missed out on his meal. I had not been around this type of prey before and they are very good hunters. Thomas L. Benson Sr.

I think Jent is on the money with his theory. When I was a teenage quail hunteer, (early 60's) we had lots of quail in Georgia and no fireants. Now we have plenty of fire ants and no quail. I watched a report on a nature tv show recently that involved a situation in Oklahoma. Seems that a certain species of song bird had almost disappeared from an area near Ft. Sill. Surveillance cameras were set up to cover several nests containing unhatched eggs. As soon as the eggs hatched, the newborn chicks were covered in fire ants and of course immediately killed. If that can happen in a nest in a tree, a quail doesn't have a chance. In Georgia and elsewhere in the south (and probably in other areas) fire ants are completely out of control. Drive by a field that has been recently burned over and the fire ant mounds are so numerous they look like an indian village. Too bad our government and the various quail organizations can't seem to muster the effort necessary to have an effect on the populations.

In all fairness - regarding quail - 40 years ago there was a lot in the way of good habitat and few, if any, planted loblolly pulpwood pine stands. The death of the small farm, and its small fields with hedgerows, and the conversion to pine plantation has removed most of our good habitat. Fire ants of predators - can't have bobs without good habitat.

In my area, once pine moved in quail dwindled quickly. I do well in some but it usually has to do with those cut-overs distance from agriculture and other habitat that is reliable year-in and year-out.

We have many, many issues facing gentleman Bob and the only fact we can agree on is that he has a sad future and little is being done to remedy that.